In December, we announcedspatial and attribute searching using the Maps Data API, which enables you to filter a large set of features by radius, bounding box, or text attributes, and sort them by their distance from a location. This means you can now create an interesting Maps API mashup (like our College Finder code sample), without running your own server or spatial database.

Today, we’re excited to make it much easier to import your geographic data as a single CSV file or KML file, instead of uploading many individual features. You can now upload thousands of features using a single POST request, and then immediately perform scalable searches over your data (while controlling exactly who has access to your maps).

If you haven’t yet tried the Maps Data API, now is a great time to give it a spin, since uploading data just got a whole lot easier.